Horace Walpole called Mary Wollstonecraft "a hyena in petticoats."
      Robert Southey, Poet Laureate of England, was reluctant to admire anybody and said quite frankly that he had praise for no living being except Mary Wollstonecraft.
      Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her famed A Vindication on the Rights of Women that was an answer to the so-called reforms in France; so-called because the reforms only affected men. Women's legal rights, in fact, were lessened in France and in most European countries by the reform movements of the late 18th and early 19th century.
      Even the fledgling United States took away some women's rights when its Constitution was adopted by specifying men's rights instead of the neutral "person."
      Although many "authorities" would have you believe that women in the "olden" days wrote out of boredom, the fact is that Mary Wollstonecraft (and most of the early women writers) wrote because she needed the money to live... her subjects, however, were of her choosing.
      She was so admired that while in London she was part of the highest literary gatherings of the liberal activists of the 18th century England. She learned French and German and traveled to France a number of times.

"...I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness...[dismiss] then those pretty feminine phrases...supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel..."
            -- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft was an honored and influential part of the London radicals which included Thomas Paine. Her works presented argument after argument for women's equality, legally, politically, economically, and socially. Her best known work Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) was written in an attempt to offset the ideas of Rousseau about women's inferiority that was gaining ground in France.
      Within a short period of time, regressive laws were being written in France and Germany as well as other European countries that gave men more rights and that took away rights from women. Laws were penned that gave men the right to determine how long a baby could be breast fed (boys longer than girls), women were forbidden to own property, etc.
      As a child Mary Wollstonecraft witnessed her drunken, vicious father openly beat her mother. She left to be a type of servant for others but returned home to nurse her dying mother and then, according to Margaret Olipant in her Literary History of England, 1790-1825,
      "When in 1787...nearly thirty...she made a home for her brothers and sisters, supported her father in his village, and was the head of all family concerns...."

MW had a daughter, Fanny, without marrying the father. She married a man other than the father of her child, became pregnant, and died after giving birth 09-10-1797 to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein. She was a passionate, all-embracing cosmopolitan woman, anything but a hyena.

"She whose sense of her own existence was so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, 'I cannot bear to think of being no more -- of losing myself -- nay it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist,' died at the age of 38. But she has her revenge. Many millions have died and been forgotten in the 130 years that have passed since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, above all that most fruitful experiment, her relations with Goodwin, and realize the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living."
            -- Virginia Woolf in her epitaph on Mary Wollstonecraft.

Some Wollstonecraft quotes:

      "Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."

      "Besides, if women be educated for dependence, that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit right or wrong to power where are we to stop?...
      "Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfill; but they are HUMAN DUTIES, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same."

"From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe the greater number of female follies proceed. I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority...I am scarcely able to govern my muscles when I see a man start with eager and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief or shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself... The lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for and deserves to be respected...

      "I never expect men to GIVE us liberty. No, women, we are not WORTH it, until we TAKE it."
            --Voltaraine de Cleyre (1866-1912).

Copyright 2000 by Irene Stuber. More than 20,000 women's biographies and thousands of facts of herstory have been gathered by istuber and used in the more than 900 episodes of Women of Achievement and Herstory that have been emailed to subscribers over the past ten years. She is in the process of slowly uploaded them to her website. As always, copies of all of istuber's writings about women work may be distributed freely for educational purposes if the copyright is observed and the articles remain unchanged. (Acknowledging her as author is appreciated.)